


The Family Business

by MaryPSue



Category: Gravity Falls, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Fluff and Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-10-21 03:48:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17635439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: “No,” Mabel interrupts, eyebrows in full Significant Waggle mode. “Grunkle Ford’s on ahunting trip.And he hasn’t been home in a couple days.”Dipper groans, dragging a hand down his face.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, that title _is_ uninspired and overused.
> 
> You're probably going to get the most out of this if you're familiar with the plot of Supernatural's first season.

There’s somebody in the kitchen.

Dipper knows as soon as he turns the key in the lock. They aren’t making a lot of noise, but – that was definitely the click of a drawer closing, the quiet pop of the fridge door opening.

“Wh -” Wendy starts, and Dipper turns to her, a finger to his lips for silence. On tiptoe, he creeps down the hall, which seems to have grown miles longer since he’d first heard the sounds. He tries to tell himself it’s just Lee or Nate or Thompson, helping themselves to his food and beer, but his mind keeps spiralling back to the still-locked front door.

He leans against the wall beside the kitchen door for a moment, listening to the quiet clatter inside. Then he spins around the doorframe, ready to pummel whoever – or  _what_ ever – dares violate the sanctuary of his student housing.

Dipper’s twin looks up from the marshmallows she’s stuffing into her mouth, and her face breaks into a broad grin. With the marshmallows in her cheeks, it gives her a distinct chipmunk-y aura. “Oh, hey, bro-bro!”

“Mabel?” Dipper asks, in disbelief. The last time he’d seen his sister, it had been through the back window of the taxi taking him away from the little family he had left. Towards a new life, he’d thought. He’d hoped. A fresh start. “No offense, but what are you doing here?”

“Ith that any way to greet your long-lotht twin thithter?” Mabel asks, through the marshmallows, before swallowing. Her smile is as brilliant as ever, though Dipper notices it no longer reaches her eyes.

“Dude, what’s going -” Wendy comes around the corner and stops at the sight of Mabel. Dipper can’t blame her. Between the half-shave and the glitter, Mabel always is an arresting sight, even when she hasn’t somehow breezed through a locked door and made herself at home in somebody else’s kitchen. “Whoa, what’s all this about?”

Mabel’s eyes light up with an unholy glee, looking from Wendy to Dipper and back again, and Dipper groans, pinching the bridge of his nose. Maybe it has been a while, but he still knows exactly what’s running through Mabel’s head.

And sure enough, the next words out of Mabel’s mouth confirm it. “Oh. Em. Gee! Dipper! You didn’t tell me you finally got yourself a  _girlfriend_!”

Beside Dipper, Wendy snorts. “Hah. He wishes.”

“We’re  _roommates_ , Mabel.”

Mabel raises one eyebrow in that annoying way she has, and smirks.

Wendy gives Mabel an appraising look. “Are you two related? You look a lot alike.”

“We’re twins!” Mabel chirps, bounding forward with a hand outstretched. “Mabel Pines! Nice to meet you!”

“Wendy Corduroy,” Wendy says, giving Mabel’s arm one good pump as she stares at Dipper, who pretends not to notice. “Twins, huh? Weird. Dipper’s never mentioned you.”

Mabel’s sunny smile slips several notches at that, and Dipper glances away as she ratchets it back up. “Well, maybe he was just scared you’d fall in love with me.” She winks, big, in Wendy’s direction, then spins to give Dipper an eyebrow waggle and an exaggerated ‘can you beLIEVE this?’ point in Wendy’s direction.

“Mabel, what  _are_  you doing here?” Dipper manages, finally, in the face of his sister’s hamminess. “If Great-Uncle Ford sent you -”

Mabel’s eye twitches, and her smile turns grimace. “A hah. About that.” She bobs her head to one side, eyes flicking in Wendy’s direction. “Grunkle Ford hasn't been home in a couple days.”

“So?” Dipper asks, crossing his arms over his chest. Nope. Nuh uh. He’s  _not_  getting dragged back into this craziness. “Have you  _met_  Grunkle Ford? He’s probably somewhere with a bottle of something strong and an ‘interesting specimen’ -”

“No,” Mabel interrupts, eyebrows in full Significant Waggle mode. “Grunkle Ford’s on a  _hunting trip_. And he hasn’t been home in a couple days.”

Dipper groans, dragging a hand down his face.

“Whoa, significant emphasis there,” Wendy says, looking from Mabel to Dipper to Mabel again. “You know what, this sounds like a family thing. I’m gonna head back to the library.” She taps Dipper’s shoulder lightly as she passes behind him. “Text me when the dust settles.”

Neither Dipper or Mabel speak again until they hear the front door shut behind Wendy.

“I like her. She seems cool,” Mabel says, a little too innocently.

“The coolest,” Dipper sighs. He already knows he’s going to regret this. “So. What’s this about Grunkle Ford?”

…

Mabel’s taste in music hasn’t changed. The 1967 Cadillac de Ville’s stereo system shudders and thumps out the bass beat under “Oops I Did It Again” as they fly down the highway, Mabel singing along at the top of her lungs and drumming on the steering wheel. Dipper rolls his eyes as he stares out the window, smiling despite himself. There are a lot of things about his life with what's left of his family that he doesn’t miss, but – this isn’t one of them.

“So what’s our play?” he asks, and Mabel glances over in his direction before reaching to turn the radio down.

“We follow up on these missing persons Grunkle Ford was looking into, and hopefully, we find him too.” Mabel drums her fingers on the steering wheel, a thoughtful frown drifting across her face as she hangs a right. For the first time, Dipper thinks he’s getting a glimpse of how much this is affecting her. He’s a little surprised. For all that Mabel had followed so closely in their great-uncle’s footsteps that she’d sometimes stepped on his heels since the house fire that killed their parents, she and Ford had never really seemed all that close. 

Though maybe Dipper’s just blinded by how much Ford always pushed  _him_  to take an interest in Ford’s work. Just because they’re similar in a lot of ways, maybe more than Ford and Mabel are, doesn’t mean Dipper wants the same things Ford does.

But that doesn’t mean he wants to see Ford get hurt, either.

“Sounds pretty simple,” Dipper says, as the flashing lights of patrol cars come into view at the top of the hill.

“Which means it won’t be,” Mabel says, as if reading Dipper’s mind. “But that’s okay. The Mystery Twins are back in action! If we can’t do it, nobody can!” She pauses a moment, then turns to Dipper with a smile dawning across her face. “Ohmigosh! Dipper! There’s two of us again, we can do the Mulder and Scully!”

“Seriously, Mabel?” Dipper sighs, but he can feel himself smiling. “Do you want to be the skeptical partner or the true believer?”

“Um, do you even have to ask?” Mabel says, as they pull up alongside the squad cars piled up around the entrance to the bridge. She parks the Caddy, and hops out, heading straight for the blockade like she belongs there.

Dipper shakes his head, and follows.

The sheriff holds out an arm to stop him as he draws level with the blockade. Dipper looks out over the bridge to see that Mabel’s already wound her way between the patrol cars and out onto the bridge itself, poking around the car sitting diagonally across the road with its nose jammed up against the railing.

“Ex _cuse_  me,” the sheriff says, and Dipper reaches into his jacket, flashing his fake FBI badge.

“Agent Nimoy, FBI. That’s my partner, Agent Kelly. We’re here about your missing persons.” He stares out at the car that Mabel’s – oh, ew, is she  _licking_  it?

The sheriff also looks out at Mabel, and then gives Dipper a stare of clear disbelief.

“Oh, yeah, her methods are unorthodox,” Dipper says. “As is her…look. But she was top of her class at the academy. A real profiler’s profiler.”

The sheriff’s still giving him that look, and Dipper shrugs, squaring his shoulders and clasping his hands behind his back in the way he knows makes him look older and more professional.

“What can you tell me about what happened here?”

…

The ghost is a Woman in White, just like the notes they find in Ford’s abandoned motel room say. And she goes after Dipper, which makes zero sense, since she’s supposed to go after unfaithful men and the last time Dipper had a girlfriend, it meant someone to hang out with on the playground at recess. Doesn’t stop her from turning up in the backseat, driving him to her abandoned house, and trying to rip his heart out of his chest, though.

Which is when Mabel turns up, just in the nick of time, with the kaddish on her lips and a shotgun loaded with rock salt in her hands.

Two living twins and three spectres of unknown religious affiliation, two of whom are underage, hardly qualify as a minyan. But the Woman in White goes quietly in the end anyway, with tears tracking down her cheeks as they warp between human flesh and sunken bone. The ghosts of her children, clutching her hands, one on either side, flash Mabel near-identical sad smiles. Then the last syllables fall from Mabel’s mouth, and they’re gone, blown away like dust on the wind.

…

“Sooo…” Mabel says, in the moment of silence after “No Scrubs” ends and whatever’s next on Mabel’s “Road Trip Mix!!! :D” CD comes on. “We did  _not_  find Grunkle Ford.”

Dipper sighs, leaning his elbow on the de Ville’s window and his chin in his hand. “I have to get back, Mabel. I’ve got entrance exams on Monday.”

Mabel lets out a long breath, but doesn’t say anything. The dulcet tones of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” flood in to fill the silence.

“We did a really good job back there,” she says, quietly. “We work really well together. You and me, we’re like, an unstoppable team! And – we really helped those people -”

“Mabel,” Dipper says, unable to keep the warning edge from his voice.

Mabel bites down on her bottom lip.

“I don’t…have a lot of family left,” she says, like the words are barbed, like it hurts to force them out. “And it feels like I just keep losing people. First Mom and Dad, then you, now Grunkle Ford…” She sighs, the sound at odds with the bubbly pop song.

“Hey.” Dipper looks up, but Mabel’s staring intently out at the road, with a focus she rarely, if ever, turns on anything that isn't a monster hunt or a crafting project. “Mabel, c’mon. You didn’t ‘lose’ me, I’m right here -”

“Oh yeah?” Mabel turns, fixing Dipper with a knowing look that makes his stomach sink straight towards his shoes. “You never return my calls, you wouldn’t meet me when we were in town chasing that sewer alligator -”

“It was finals week, Mabel, I didn’t have time -”

“How come you never told Wendy you had a twin?” Mabel demands, and Dipper’s tongue knots in his mouth.

“I just…” he says, slowly, trying to line up his thoughts in his head. “I wanted college to be something that was…mine. That wasn’t about – the thing that killed our parents, or the supernatural, or what Ford wants from me, or how much better than me you are at all this stuff…” He rubs the back of his neck. “I don’t know. It’s not like I don’t want to be your twin, it’s just – it was nice not to be compared to you for once.”

Mabel’s silent, for an uncomfortably long time, tapping her fingers thoughtlessly against the steering wheel as “Barbie Girl” ends and P!nk’s “Get The Party Started” comes on.  

“Is that why you left?” she asks, so quiet that Dipper almost can’t hear her over the song.

Dipper shrugs one shoulder, turning to look out the window at the fields flying by.

…

It’s dark by the time Mabel drops him off at the house. She waits until Dipper’s out with his duffle bag, then peels away from the curb with a huge, insincere smile and a “See ya round!”. The de Ville’s candy-apple red tailfins and familiar STNLYMBL license plate disappear away down the street, and Dipper has to force himself to look away before the taillights vanish from view.

The house is dark, and quiet, the only sound the soft rustle of the shower running in the bathroom down the hall from his room. Dipper unlocks the door, shuffles inside, and flops facefirst onto the bed without bothering to kick the door shut behind him.

He feels tired, right down to his bones. Like he’s been gone a lifetime tearing around the countryside in the old Caddy with Mabel instead of just a weekend. Like he’s been awake the whole time. Like he had to walk the whole way. His chest is still twinging a little, where the Woman in White had stabbed a clawed, bony hand through it, and Dipper rolls over onto his back, eyes closed, breathing slow, pressing a hand over his breastbone. Mabel was right, most of the spirits they meet are just troubled, but there are some he finds it real hard to say mourning rites for. A mother who killed her own children over her own rage and grief? Definitely one of them.

He can’t remember ever feeling this tired. He’d sworn he’d never let himself get sucked back into this life, and yet here he is, the night before entrance exams, and all he can think about is angry ghosts –

Something cold splashes against his face.

“Oh,  _fuck_ ,” Dipper mutters, throwing up a hand to protect himself against the splatter of chilly droplets. If they’ve burst  _another_  pipe, their damage deposit is already gone, that’s gonna come straight out of pocket, and he has a part-time job in the commissary but Wendy’s always broke –

Dipper opens his eyes, reluctantly, and looks up at the ceiling. Instead of the spreading, bulging brown-edged stain he’d expected to see, though, there’s something up there that sends an electric jolt up his spine and freezes his bones to the marrow, something that jerks him instantly, painfully awake.

The ceiling is bleeding.

There’s a red patch up there, not very large, maybe about the size of a dinner plate. As Dipper watches, another droplet tugs away from the puddle, dangles obscenely for a moment, suspended above him – and then drops.

Dipper twists his face away, and the drop splatters against his cheek. In the sudden hush, it sounds like a gunshot, like the crack of doom.

And then come the flames.

…

Mabel settles her leather jacket a little more carefully around Dipper’s shoulders. He’s broader in the back than she is, so it doesn’t exactly fit, and the diamantes she’s studded it with dig uncomfortably into his neck and his chin, but Dipper doesn’t protest. He’s probably in shock. A blanket would be best, but that would mean going over to that fire truck and admitting to them that he was in the now-blazing house when it went up and explaining the blood on his face and the long-lost twin sister who turned up out of nowhere to pull him out and where Wendy is and he’s so, so tired.

“Did you see -” Mabel starts, again, and Dipper sighs.

“I  _told_  you, Mabel, she wasn’t there. It was just – just blood.” He shivers. It’s a warm night, and the heat from the burning house is probably enough to reach them out here, but Dipper can’t feel any of it. He’s just cold.

Mabel nods, fiddles with the collar of her jacket under Dipper’s chin for another moment, then gets up and turns on the police scanner in the Caddy’s dash. They listen to the radio chatter back and forth – a noise complaint on the frat block, an altercation in a McDonalds’ parking lot, a young woman, still missing after a house fire in student housing. It’s been a while since Dipper had to translate police radio codes, but it comes right back. Just like riding a bicycle. It all comes right back.

“Do you think it was -” Mabel starts, and Dipper curls a fist in the lapels of her jacket, tugging it tighter around him.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” He stares at the house until the fire leaves afterimages, burned on his eyes, until he can’t tell what are real and what are illusory flames. “And Mabel?”

Mabel sits, immediately, on the trunk beside Dipper, looking over at him, hanging on his next words.

“We’re gonna kill that son of a bitch,” Dipper breathes. It feels final – like a commencement speech, or a eulogy, almost. An epitaph for the normal life Dipper Pines almost had.

Mabel doesn’t say anything, but she does shift a little so that their arms press against each other, leaning her head on his shoulder. Her hair tickles Dipper’s nose, but he doesn’t move to brush it out of the way.

They stay like that until the fire has mostly turned to smoke and steam and embers.

 

 

 

_one season later_

“We’re gonna need some backup.”

…

The junkyard is exactly like Dipper remembers it, a graveyard of cars both classic and contemporary, a few miscellaneous big dogs and the ever-present (and ever-mysterious) goat wandering or napping among the wrecks. The sign over the door of the shabby old garage is still missing a letter, its shadow faded into the peeling paint.

Mabel goes charging in first, ducking as she crosses the threshold. Dipper, following behind her, pauses a moment before the doorway. The shotgun blast goes right over Mabel’s head, blowing out a chunk of the doorframe just by Dipper’s ear, and he can’t help but grin. Clearly, some things haven’t changed.

“Grunkle  _Stan!_ ” Mabel shouts, dashing across the kitchen and flinging both arms around their great-uncle’s middle. Stan clearly tries to poker-face at her, but the way he shifts the shotgun to one hand and gives her hair a ruffle with the other is kind of a tell.

“You know the drill, pumpkin. Holy water first, then hugs.”

Mabel huffs out a sigh and rolls her eyes. “Grunkle Stan, we’re  _Jewish_.”

“Yeah, but these demons that been popping up like mushrooms ain’t. Holy water, kiddo.”

Mabel lets out an exaggerated sigh, but she takes the flask Stan digs out of his back pocket and takes a swig, holding out her arms like she’s showing off how much it’s not burning her. She waves the flask in Dipper’s direction next, and Dipper reluctantly steps forward to take it, throwing back a slug.

Stan’s double-take is almost certainly put on for comedic effect, but he does look genuinely surprised to see Dipper. “Well, wouldja look at that. If it isn’t the prodigal son.” He takes the flask of holy water back from Dipper with a suspicious scowl, even though Dipper just passed his test. “Thought you swore you were never coming back here.”

Dipper raises both eyebrows, glances across the kitchen at the fridge. “Did Ford tell you that?”

Stan just gives him a hard look, then turns away. "Look, you know as well as I do that my twin can be a real asshole, but no matter how pissed he was about you walking out, he never woulda badmouthed you to me. Maybe he's not an easy guy to get along with, but he cares about you kids. Even if he's got a funny way of showing it sometimes."

Dipper stifles a laugh. "You can say that again. Or maybe it'd be more accurate to say he doesn't show it at all."

Stan sighs. “Well, it’s good to see you again anyway, kid. Just wish it was under better circumstances.”

...

Mabel fills Stan in on everything that's happened - tracking the yellow-eyed demon to Salvation, the call Grunkle Ford had taken, how they'd split up and how Ford had been abducted - while Dipper flips through the enormous book that Stan had hauled out of his library. Mabel being, well, Mabel, it’s not exactly easy to pay attention to anything other than her storytelling.

Dipper wanders out of the kitchen, heading for the worn armchair by the fireplace. He doesn’t take his nose out of the book. The Key of Solomon, according to Stan. Dipper wishes the only place he'd ever encountered the stupid book was in the Library Sciences course he'd picked up as an option last semester.

Still, no matter the circumstances, it’s very, very cool to get to hold in his hands, to page through spells and seals and -

“Oh, sorry,” a familiar voice says, and then, “Dipper?”

Dipper looks up. “Wendy?”

Wendy grins, broad and bright. “Hey, dude! I’m so glad to see you, I kinda thought you might have been eaten by some kind of monster. Your family is so cool, Dipper. Why didn’t you ever introduce me to any of them?”

“Long story. What - what are you -” Dipper stammers, watching Wendy’s eyes carefully for any flash of black, of yellow.

“Doing here?” Wendy finishes for him. “Your great-uncle showed up at the house just after Robbie went all nuts and tried to pin me to the ceiling, did this whole ‘come with me if you want to live’ bit." She winces before saying, "Hey, if you see Robbie before I do, tell him no hard feelings, all right? I know he was possessed, and I'm sure he understands the axe wounds were inflicted in self-defence."

"My great-uncle? That's weird, Grunkle Stan doesn't do much fieldwork, and I don't know why he would've been -" Dipper starts, and Wendy shakes her head.

"No, not Stan, the other one. He’s...a total nerd, but kind of a badass, too.”

“Wh- Grunkle  _Ford_?” Dipper asks, disbelieving, and Wendy nods. 

“Yeah, man. He sent whatever was possessing Robbie packing, dropped me off here, and I’ve just been doing axe practice with Stan and reading up on what kills different monsters since then.” She laughs, a little too bright and too brittle. “Also apparently demons are real. Is that fucked up or what?”

It takes Dipper a second to find his voice.

“Tell me about it,” he says, weakly, at last.

...

The information they get out of Pacifica during the exorcism checks out. They find Ford, unconscious, in the Sunrise Apartments block, and barely make it out, with him and the memory gun, in one piece.

And that's when everything goes wrong.

Dipper's ashamed to admit that he doesn't notice right away. Mabel has to almost hand the memory gun over to Ford before something, some quirk of a smile or edge of a laugh or turn of a phrase, sends him scrambling across the abandoned farmhouse, yelling, "Wait - Mabel, don't -"

"Dipper?" Mabel asks, half-turning to look at him, and that's when Ford - the  _thing_  wearing Ford like a rented tuxedo grabs the memory gun from her, wrenching her arm down at an angle Dipper's pretty sure arms aren't meant to bend at. Mabel's scream is horrible, but the smile that slashes across Ford's face is somehow worse.

"Ooh, good catch, kid!" the thing possessing Ford says brightly, turning that smile in Dipper's direction. Its voice is too nasal, too sarcastic to be mistaken for Ford's. "And it only took you, what, two hours? Three? You and your great-uncle sure must be close -"

"Shut up," Dipper grinds out, between gritted teeth.

"How -" Mabel gasps, cradling her injured arm close to her chest. "But you passed the test -"

"What, that stuff with the holy water? Geez, I'm disappointed in you guys! Woulda thought you of all people wouldn't buy into that 'Christianity applies to everybody' baloney!"

"You're literally a demon," Dipper points out, quite reasonably, he thinks.

The thing in Ford's body rolls its yellow, slitted eyes. It's - honestly, it's really horrible to look at. Now that it's not pretending to be Ford anymore, its expressions, its movements, even just the way it holds itself are all different, and overlaid over the so-familiar figure of Dipper and Mabel's great-uncle, they all just scream 'wrong'. "Sure, sure, just paint all demons with the same brush. Like you know anything about us, kid."

"I know how to kill you," Dipper says, hoping he sounds more confident than he feels.

The unblinking yellow stare that the thing in Ford's body turns on him seems to say otherwise.

And then it grins.

"You know what, that's not a bad idea!" it says, almost chirps. It steps past Mabel, ignoring her wide-eyed stare, and holds the memory gun out to Dipper. "Give it a shot, kid! Let's see what you think you know."

Dipper eyes the gun, dangling tantalisingly in front of him. He locks eyes with the demon in Ford's body as he reaches out.

The hilt of the memory gun is cold and heavy in his hand.

"Dipper, no!" Mabel gasps as Dipper raises the memory gun. He hopes - though he knows it's futile - that the demon doesn't notice the way his hand shakes. "That's our grunkle!"

"Not right now, it isn't," Dipper says, settling his finger on the trigger.

"But if you shoot it, you'll wipe out Grunkle Ford too!"

"That's right!" the demon in Ford's body says, still grinning so wide it must hurt, throwing out both arms and advancing, step by looming step, towards Dipper. "So go ahead! Isn't this what you wanted? Isn't this what your  _uncle_  would want? I killed your parents and ruined your life! You've been hunting me for decades, and now here I am! C'mon, kid, don't you have the guts? Take - the - shot!"

That awful smile is right in Dipper's face, and he squeezes his eyes shut and pulls the trigger.

When he opens his eyes, though, it's to those slitted yellow eyes still winking at him from his great-uncle's face.

"How - what -" Dipper stammers, stumbling backwards, holding the memory gun between himself and the demon like a security blanket. Which would be about as useful as the gun turned out to be. "Grunkle Ford told us this could kill you!"

"Oh, I bet he did!" the demon in Ford's body cackles. "But let me tell you, kid, there's a whole lot ol' Fordsy  _didn't_  tell you. You should ask him about me someday! About what really happened to your parents!"

"Our -" Dipper starts, but then one of Ford's broad hands grabs him by the throat and pins him up against the wall. Dipper kicks out and struggles for breath, lungs burning, but the demon's grip is solid.

"Of course," it says thoughtfully, stroking its chin with its free hand in a mockery of one of Ford's favourite mannerisms, "you'd both have to be alive for that to happen."

Dipper gasps, uselessly, as the demon tightens Ford's fingers around his throat.

His vision starts to darken, tunneling around the edges, but it doesn't go dark so fast that he can't see the movement over Ford's shoulder. And, despite everything, he can't help but smile.

The demon narrows Ford's eyes. "Hey, what's so funny -"

And then Mabel slams the fireplace poker into the side of its head.

The demon stumbles, letting go of Dipper's throat as it goes down on one knee. It looks up at Mabel, that smile still slashed across Ford's face and a dangerous glint in its eyes.

"Well, I gotta hand it to you two! You sure are persistent! So I guess I'll let you off the hook for now." The smile slides off of Ford's face, eyes narrowing as Dipper steps over beside Mabel, trading the memory gun for the poker dangling in her good hand. " **But know this.** " Its voice goes deeper, picking up a strange reverb as it says, " **A darkness approaches. A time will come when everything you care about will change.** " Its smile snaps back, as though nothing is wrong. "Until then, I'll be watching you! I'll be watching..."

It winks one yellow eye, and waves.

And then it throws Ford's head back, and a jet of blue flame pours from Ford's open mouth, splashing against the ceiling. It goes on, and on, until finally Ford's mouth shuts, and with a sigh, he topples over onto his side, unconscious.

Dipper looks over at Mabel, sees his own confusion and fear written on her face.

Somehow, between the two of them, they manage to drag Ford out to the de Ville before the burning roof of the farmhouse collapses.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So remember that thing I said about not writing any more of this?
> 
> I lied.

_September, 1997_

_The noise in the firing range is deafening._

_Mabel hangs back, darting nervous looks over at her great-uncle and her brother. Ford’s showing Dipper how to aim high, how to place his hands on the pistol’s grip, how to hold his arms to brace for the kick. He’s smiling, for once, just a little, and Mabel wishes she could be happy about that._

_The gun in her own hands, the shinier twin of the one Dipper’s holding, feels very heavy and cold._

_Ford glances up, that smile fading a little as he takes in the look on Mabel’s face, the way she’s holding the pistol out like it’s something slimy, like she doesn’t want to touch it. Well, she doesn’t, really. But her great-uncle put it in her hands, and said he wanted her to be able to protect herself, and if it makes him smile like that, Mabel’s not exactly going to say no._

_“Is something wrong?” Ford asks, and Mabel shakes her head, almost dislodging the huge earmuffs that are supposed to be keeping the noise out. “Do you need me to go over the technique with you again?”_

_Mabel shakes her head again. She folds her hands carefully around the pistol’s grip, the way Grunkle Ford had showed her. She hopes he can’t see them shake._

_“Why don’t you try taking a few shots, get a feel for how it fires?” Ford says, kindly, and Mabel bites her bottom lip._

_“Grunkle Ford, why are you showing us this stuff?”_

_Anything that was left of Ford’s smile vanishes. Dipper shoots Mabel a frightened look over their great-uncle’s shoulder, but Ford doesn’t seem angry. Instead, he just gives Mabel a sad look, kneeling to put a hand on her shoulder._

_“Mabel, I wish you didn’t need to know it. But the truth is, the world is a more dangerous place than most people know. I failed to keep your parents safe. I won’t make the same mistakes with you two.”_

_Mabel looks down at the pistol she’s holding. It looks ridiculously big in her hands, the light catching off the silver scrollwork carved in its side. It’s too pretty for something so dangerous._

_“Mom and Dad always said not to play with guns,” she says, so quiet it’s barely more than a whisper._

_Grunkle Ford starts to scowl, but turns it into a smile, big and fake. He gives her shoulder a squeeze._

_“It’s all right, Mabel. If you don’t want to learn to shoot, then you can go wait in the car. Please make sure you clean and put away the gun properly, though, it’s no good not to respect your weapons. They might save your life someday.” He straightens up, and turns back to Dipper, looking over the holes in the paper target thoughtfully. “Not bad, my boy, but I think you’re pulling a little to the left when you fire. You’ll want to aim more to the right to correct that…”_

_Mabel looks at them for a long time, watching her great-uncle’s smile slowly working its way back onto his face as he adjusts Dipper’s arms and plugs his ears as Dipper fires off another three shots in quick succession. The first_ bang! _makes Mabel flinch, but she forces herself to stand still through the next two, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth. Ford doesn’t so much as glance back in her direction._

_Mabel sucks in another long breath, and puts her shoulders back, sticking her chin out. She shifts her grip on the pistol in her hands, raises it slowly. It’s still heavy, but it’s less cold now that her grip has warmed it up, and she tries to think of it as an extension of her arm the way Grunkle Ford told her to._

_She takes careful aim at the paper target at the other end of the range, bites down on her bottom lip, aims a little up and a little right, and fires. One, two, three, four, five, six. She only stops when the trigger clicks uselessly under her finger instead of slamming the pistol back in her hand with an explosive_ bang!

_When she looks up, Dipper’s staring at her like he’s never seen her before. But Grunkle Ford isn’t looking at her at all. He’s looking at her paper target, and he’s –_

_Smiling. He’s really smiling._

_Mabel dares to look back at the target. There are a couple of holes in the white paper, where her first shots had gone a little high. But there’s also a little constellation of holes in the black of the human silhouette. Two of them are right where the heart would be._

_Mabel feels a little bit sick to her stomach. But when her great-uncle gives her hair a ruffle and says, “Well, would you look at that! We’ll make a marksman of you yet!”, it’s easy to swallow down._

…

Ford hasn’t woken up.

Mabel’s a little worried. Okay, a lot worried. Maybe he’s in a coma. Maybe that demon guy messed with his brain. Maybe her great-uncle is trapped in there, beating against the walls of his mind, unable to get out, while his body sleeps peacefully out here. Maybe her great-uncle is just – gone.

On the other hand, Grunkle Ford’s never been all that great at sleeping like a normal human being. Maybe his body’s just playing catchup.

“I don’t understand,” Dipper keeps saying, over and over again. Mabel kind of wishes he would shut up, but then again, she gets it. She doesn’t understand either. “Why would Great-uncle Ford put all of us in so much danger for a gun that doesn’t even work? It doesn’t make any sense!”

“Kid, we all know my brother ain’t much of one for regular person logic,” Stan grumbles, from the living room-cum-library where he’s been poking through dusty old book after dusty old book. “Though I gotta wonder if he even knew it wasn’t gonna work.”

“The demon said ‘there’s a lot your great-uncle didn’t tell you’,” Mabel says, not taking her eyes off of Ford’s unconscious body.

“You know they lie, right, sweetie?” Stan says, and Mabel thinks he sounds…anxious? Maybe? Maybe it’s just worry about Grunkle Ford leaking into his voice, but Mabel doesn’t think so.

“Do _you_ know what Grunkle Ford wasn’t telling us?” she asks, turning to stare her other great-uncle down. “Was it something to do with our parents?”

Stan meets her gaze head-on, giving her a hard stare. Mabel stares back.

“I know all of your ticklish spots, old man,” she warns him, and Stan bites his lip, obviously biting down a laugh.

“Grunkle Stan, I think you know we deserve the truth,” Dipper says, his voice serious for once and not his Dipper’s-trying-to-be-serious voice, which is different and way squeakier. “Do you know something about what Great-uncle Ford was planning?”

Stan looks from Dipper to Mabel and back again, and then sighs, seeming to deflate.

“Look,” he says. “I tried to stay outta it. I tried to get Ford to stay outta it, too. Told ‘im not to go borrowing trouble.”

“But?” Dipper asks, crossing his arms over his chest.

Stan shrugs. “He fought your grandpa for custody, when your parents died. He wanted you two, wanted to raise you up in this life. He had some cockeyed idea that that fire, that thing targeting your family, was his fault somehow. He thought he hadda make up for it by getting you two ready.”

“Ready for _what_?” Dipper asks, and Stan shrugs.

“Hell if I know. That demon coming back, maybe?” He shoots a pointed glare in Ford’s direction. “Guess we got no way of knowing now.”

“Would you stop talking about Grunkle Ford like he’s dead?” Mabel says sharply. The words surprise even her.

“Mabel -” Dipper starts, but Stan cuts him off.

“Nah, she’s right. Long as he’s still breathing, there’s still hope, right?” Stan says, but the uneasy glance he casts in the direction of Ford’s still-motionless body seems to say otherwise.

Dipper’s the first one to break the uncomfortable silence. “Why would Great-uncle Ford think the fire was his fault?”

Stan shrugs. “Beats me.” He looks up at Mabel as he says, “You’ll hafta ask ‘im yourself when he wakes up.”

Dipper gives Ford’s sleeping form a long, hard look.

“If he wakes up,” he says.

…

Mabel cleans her pistol carefully, methodically, mindlessly. She’s gone through all of the steps a million times, over the last however many years. She could do this blindfolded. Has done this blindfolded, once or twice, or near enough, by feel in the dark while Dipper was passed out on the motel bed next to hers. It’s harder, with her arm heavily bandaged and sending up a hot sharp pulse of pain every time she twists it wrong, but that just means she has to slow down, take more care.

Beside her, Dipper flips a page in the thick, heavy book he’s buried his nose in. He hasn’t moved from that position, except to swap out books, for hours.

It’s a familiar scenario. Under normal circumstances, Mabel would be thrilled to have her brother back beside her, the quiet flip of pages in her ears, the smell of dusty book and gun oil and Stan’s terrible cooking filling the air. The house fire happened when they were both so young, Mabel barely remembers what life was like before then. Next to the de Ville, this is what Mabel thinks of when she thinks of home. And it wasn’t so long ago that she thought she’d never have it back.

But with Grunkle Ford still unconscious, Mabel can’t relax and appreciate it.

She jumps when Dipper smacks one hand against the page, pushing his chair back from the table. “Check it out, I think I found something!” He spins the book towards Mabel, and she leans over to squint at the writing. “This root lets you dreamwalk – go into somebody else’s dreams. Maybe we could use this to find out what’s going on in there.”

“Awesome!” Mabel says, setting down the pistol to drag the book closer with her good hand.

“Yeah,” Dipper says, his voice drooping along with his shoulders as his eyes scan the page. “The only problem is thaaaaaat it only grows in Africa. Well, back to the old drawing board.”

Mabel shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe, maybe not. You up for a road trip?” She looks up at the look on Dipper’s face, grins. “Kidding! I’m kidding. I know there’s ocean between us and Africa. It’d have to be a cruise.”

“Ugh, _Mabel_ ,” Dipper sighs, putting his head into one hand and leaning his elbow against the table, pulling the book back towards him. But he’s smiling, so Mabel counts that one into the win column. She reaches over and scoops her gun back towards her as Dipper sticks his nose back into the book.  

The steady flip of pages is soothing to listen to, soft and constant and predictable as the strokes of Mabel’s chamois over the metal of her pistol. Mabel lets the quiet rhythm lull her, just a little. Just enough to forget, for a little while, every bad thing that brought them here. Just enough to enjoy, for as long as it lasts, the simple pleasure of sharing a peaceful silence with her brother again.

“Mabel?”

Mabel looks over at Dipper, ready to ask if he’s found anything, but the words shrivel and die on her tongue. Dipper’s still sitting beside her, that book open on the table in front of him, exactly like he had been when Mabel’d turned her attention back to her task. That’s his silly wannabe-lumberjack flannel shirt, his unruly brown curls that are starting to get too long to control again, his face so much like but so unlike Mabel’s own, as familiar as her own eyes in the mirror.

But whatever’s looking out of that face at her, its eyes too wide and poisonous yellow, isn’t her brother.

Mabel starts to jump to her feet, throwing the chair back, but the steering wheel gets in her way. She stares, wide-eyed, at the road scrolling past the Stanleymobile’s windshield. It appears to be made of liquorice.

“I’m dreaming,” she says, automatically closing her hands on the wheel as she stares out at the world around her. Well, one hand, anyway. Her injured arm protests when she tries to wrap the fingers around the wheel, so she lets go, resting the heel of her open hand against the wheel instead.

“Close enough!” the demon wearing her brother’s face chirps. “I picked a place where you’d feel at home. Gotta say, the inside of your head? Preeeeeetty weird! Almost creepy, even!”

“Are those…stuffed animal trees?” Mabel asks, choosing to ignore all the other stuff for the moment for the sake of her sanity.

“Looks like it!” the demon agrees with her. “Seriously, I’ve seen the insides of a _lot_ of long-time hunters’ heads – and I mean a _lot_! – and I can’t tell if you’re less fucked up than most of them or more!”

“I’m gonna take that as a compliment,” Mabel says, leaning over to turn on the stereo. The dulcet tones of N*SYNC’s harmonies wash over her, and she takes a deep breath, considering her next move.

“Well, it wasn’t one!” the demon says brightly.

“Tough shit,” Mabel says, firmly.

“Aaaaanyway. Changing the subject!” the demon says, after a brief pause. “This place isn’t for me. It’s for you! So you can relax -”

“I really can’t,” Mabel says. “Not with you right there pretending to be possessing my _brother_.”

The demon looks at her, long and flat, and it takes Mabel way too long to figure out that its features are changing. Shifting. She almost doesn’t realise it until it’s the great-uncle who’d raised her staring back at her with those horrible eyes.

“Not better,” Mabel says.

The demon shrugs, ripples, settles back into a form Mabel doesn’t recognise right away. He’s familiar, though, from his curly frosted tips all the way down to his flame-printed pants.

“Are you -” Mabel shakes her head. “Are you pretending to be nineties Justin Timberlake?”

The demon stares blankly at her for a moment, before cracking an awkward, humourless smile across that beautiful, beautiful face. “…y…es?”

Mabel squints at him.

“Look, I just found this schmuck in your head, you seem to like him,” the demon says, waving a hand like it’s trying to brush this all aside.

“Well, I used to,” Mabel sighs, leaning forward to bonk her forehead against the steering wheel. “Great. Just great. Now I can never listen to Bye Bye Bye again.”

She straightens up, slowly, with a long, deep breath in. Outside, the pink and blue tuffets of cotton-candy bushes blur into a long purple streak.

“What do you want?” she asks, finally.

The demon makes a big show of running a hand through that curly hair. “To talk! We kinda got off on the wrong foot!”

“Yeah, you possessed my grunkle, broke my arm, and tried to burn me and my brother alive,” Mabel says, waving her bandaged arm at the demon. So it isn’t really _broken_ , so much. Dislocated. Same difference. “That’s so the wrong foot that it’s like a mutant third foot you grew on your forehead after you got dunked in radioactive waste!”

It’s the demon’s turn to squint at Mabel.

“Kid, I like you,” it says, finally. “You’ve got a real sense of humour! Not like some meatsacks – uh, _mortals_ – I could name!”

“Now, _that_? _That_ is _not_ a compliment.”

The demon ignores Mabel, waving a hand dismissively as it grins a too-broad grin out the window at the candy-coloured landscape with its rolling, glittering hills in the distance. “Which is why I’m gonna give you a freebie! Just to prove to you what a decent guy I really am! You know! Deep down!”

“Okay, for you, that’s gotta be really deep,” Mabel says, and the demon laughs, a horrible high-pitched nasal cackle that leaves Mabel wincing like the sound of nails on a chalkboard.

“You have _nooooo_ idea!” it says. “But who cares! We’re talking about _you_!” It spreads its arms wide, and winks. “Gotta say, it was a mistake to drag you and that brother of yours into me and Fordsy’s business! Sure, we’ve got our history, but you two? Clean slate!”

Mabel looks at it until it has the decency to look embarrassed.

“All right, so that one didn’t go exactly as planned!” it says. “But that’s why I’m gonna tell you how to get into your great-uncle’s head and wake him up! One freebie, just to make it up to you! No strings attached!”

Mabel keeps looking at it.

“Okay, nope,” she says, and, with her good arm, cranks the wheel hard to the right.

The demon clings to the seat with one hand, the door with the other, as the Stanleymobile bumps down into the ditch and roars over into the fields, crushing cotton-candy bushes under its wheels. “What are you _doing_?!”

Mabel narrows her eyes as she floors the gas pedal, letting go of the wheel for one nervewrecking moment to shift up and up again as the Stanleymobile gathers speed. “If you come close to dying in a dream you wake up, right?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works!” the demon in her passenger seat screeches, as Mabel aims them for the solid-looking trunk of the nearest stuffed animal tree. “And a dream demon oughtta know!”

“Thanks,” Mabel says, shifting up again. “Come on, Mabel… _wake…up -_ ”

The tree looms upward to fill her vision, the eyes of the stuffed animals dangling from its branches wide and terrified. Their squeals of fear mingle with the constant, high-pitched shriek coming from her passenger seat, but Mabel doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow down. The Stanleymobile barrels forward, and the tree comes closer, closer –

Mabel starts awake, gasping for breath. She’s out of the chair and shaking her brother’s shoulders almost before it really registers that she’s awake. “Dipper! DipperDipper _Dipper_ wake _up!_ ”

Dipper snorts in his sleep, wrinkles up his nose and buries his face into his arms, folded on top of the open book. “Whfrgl – Mabel, what -”

Mabel lets out a breath it feels like she’s been holding for a long time. She flops back into her seat, suddenly feeling like a marionette with all her strings cut. “Please tell me you weren’t dreaming about him too.”

Dipper gives her a flat, blank look, and Mabel blows out another breath, her hair fluttering in the wind of it.

“Mabel, what are you -” Dipper starts, and Mabel gives another huff, deliberately blowing her hair up this time.

“It was that demon guy, okay? He wanted something from me and he was being a total creep about it.” She kicks her booted feet against the floor, the soles going _thumpthumpthump._

“It was a nightmare, Mabel,” Dipper says, straightening up from the table and scooping up the book he was reading. He slams it shut and tucks it under one arm. “Don’t worry so much about it.”

“But -” Mabel starts, but Dipper’s already out the door.

…

“Here, I got it,” Dipper says, throwing the book down in the middle of the kitchen table, nearly splattering Mabel’s BLT all down the front of her sweater. It’s one of her favourites, too, the one with the sequin pig on the front. She shoots him her best death glare, but Dipper doesn’t seem to notice, too preoccupied with the dusty old book in front of him. It’s not one Mabel recognises, bound in what looks like red leather with brass fastenings glittering at the corners. The writing inside is spidery and faded. “A spell for dreamwalking. This’ll let us find out what’s going on in Grunkle Ford’s head.”

Mabel looks down at the page, then up at her brother.

“Wow, that was fast,” she says. “Like, reeeaaaaally fast. Maybe even _supernaturally_ fast.”

Dipper has the decency to look embarrassed.

Stan pauses in the middle of pouring himself a mug of coffee, leans over to see what the two of them are looking it. “Huh. Didn’t even know I had that,” he says, looking over the book in the middle of the table. “Where’d you find it?”

“Holding up that two-legged side table out in the living room,” Dipper says. “You know, Grunkle Stan, just because you live in a salvage yard doesn’t mean everything you own has to be salvaged. Like, from the dump.”

“Ha, ha, you’re so funny I forgot to laugh,” Stan says, deadpan, before turning back to his coffee.

“I think a better question is _how_ you found it,” Mabel says, jabbing a finger against the open page. “If it was holding up a table.”

Dipper looks up and meets her gaze, which Mabel is quite sure looks piercing and inquisitive and determined and –

“Mabel, why are you making that face?”

Mabel breaks eye contact. “Ugh! Dipper, just admit it. You listened to the demon guy, didn’t you?”

Dipper looks furious for half a second, but then lets out a long sigh. “Fine. So I listened to the demon guy. What was I supposed to do? Just ignore what he said and not check it out? When it could be our only real chance?”

“Yeah, maybe?” Mabel snaps back. “Dipper, you don’t know what he’s gonna ask for in exchange! You don’t know if he’s gonna try to get you to trust him with a couple wins and then trick you into doing something bad! You don’t even know if this spell is actually gonna work the way we want it to! Why would you trust a demon?”

“I’m not -” Dipper breaks off, glaring up at his hair where it flops over his forehead, and brushes it back, briefly revealing his birthmark before letting his hair fall back into place. “Mabel, c’mon. You know I know better than to trust a _demon_.”

“Oh yeah, but you want us to use a spell that one gave us?”

“Whoa, what? What’s this about demons?” Stan says, banging his mug against the table and scowling at the book in the middle of the table. He glares up at Dipper, then over at Mabel, and Mabel bites down on her bottom lip with a sheepish smile. She’s gotten used to Ford’s disapproval, she’s almost immune now, but Grunkle Stan giving her that disappointed stare? Ouch _._ “What’re you brats not telling me?”

Dipper and Mabel share a look.

“The demon that possessed Grunkle Ford popped up in my dream when I passed out doing research and tried to make nice.” Mabel shoots a look sidelong at Dipper and adds, “And it sounds like it did the same to Dipper. Except _Dipper_ listened to it!”

“Mabel!”

“What, is that not what you just did?”

Dipper shakes his head angrily, crossing his arms over his chest. “Mabel, _seriously_.”

“Kid -” Stan starts, but Dipper just shakes his head again.

“I don’t believe this. Do you guys want to help Great-uncle Ford or not?”

“Of course we want to help Grunkle Ford!” Mabel protests. “But – Dipper, that demon acted like it’d known Grunkle Ford a long time, and it said something about ‘what really happened to our parents’. And Stan said Grunkle Ford thought that was his fault, and that he had to keep us safe from something…what do you _think_ happened?”

Nothing ever seems to ruffle Stan, except seeing his brother or the kids in danger, so the expression on his face gives even Mabel pause. Dipper looks almost embarrassed, which he should. Mabel’s not the one who’s taking demon-hunting advice from an actual demon.

“Yeah, I don’t think that thing wants to help anybody but itself,” Stan finally says, shortly. “No way we’re using this spell, kid.”

“Aw, Grunkle Stan! You always take Mabel’s side!” Dipper protests, but he doesn’t sound all that upset. Actually, now even he’s eyeing the book in the middle of the table like it’s a poisonous chimera just waiting for the right moment to bite or sting him. “Look, I was just trying to help. What else are we gonna do? Just pop over to Africa for some dream root?”

“Wait, that’s your big idea?” Stan grabs his coffee mug back up, stepping back to lean against the counter as he takes a sip. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“Um, we got…a little sidetracked,” Dipper says.

“Demon,” Mabel says, at the same time.

“Whatever. I don’t actually care,” Stan says. “But yeah, if it’s dream root you’re going with?” He drains his coffee mug, makes a face, and says, staring into the bottom of his empty mug, “I know a guy.”

…

Stan’s “guy” turns out to actually be a “gal”.

“Carla McCorkle,” Stan grinds out, as the woman – she can’t be a day under fifty-five, and Mabel has to wonder what her and Stan’s history is – twinkles at them both, giving them a smile that’s somehow both charming and mocking. “Best in the business. You need it, she can get it. Not that she comes cheap.”

“Nobody’s ever accused me of being _that_ ,” Carla agrees, looking at Stan like she’d like to be licking his face. Stan, for his part, is staring wearily forward, looking like he’d like Carla to be doing anything other than licking his face. Interesting. “If you have to ask, you probably can’t afford me.”

“I’m sorry, Stan, Carla is a – _what_?” Dipper says, and Stan and Carla share a look that Mabel could swear actually smoulders. But then Stan turns back to shoot Dipper a death glare and Carla starts looking around the front room with a frozen expression that seems to sum up the dirt and the cobwebs pretty nicely.

“Acquirer of and dealer in magical artefacts, kiddo,” Carla says, despite seemingly not paying attention. “Stanley, how many generations of spider have you let live and breed up in that corner? If it’s seven, I’ll take some of that web.”

“Who in their right mind pays attention to -” Stan starts, then looks over, to see Carla grinning at him. “Oh, come on, that wasn’t funny the first time.”

“No, it wasn’t, it was hilarious,” Carla says, dropping her tote bag onto the kitchen table beside Dipper’s spellbook. She reaches in and pulls out a jar of something that looks awfully shrivelled and black. Mabel can’t tell if that’s the magical root they’re looking for, or vanilla beans. She’s suddenly and painfully reminded of the stash of old, worthless StanCo merch Stan still has sitting stored all through the bowels of the house, the old commercials featuring Stan’s terrible moustache and even worse products. “So! Are we doing business, old man?”

Stan matches her, gaze for steely gaze, and gestures towards the living room. “You tell me, old woman.” He pauses a moment, looking back at Dipper and Mabel, before following Carla out of the room. “I’ll handle the – uh – ‘negotiations’.”

Dipper, elaborately, mimes throwing up.

“Aw, I think it’s sweet,” Mabel protests. “Did you see the way they looked at each other? They’re _soooo_ in love.”

“Mabel, you said that about two dead flies that got trapped in the window once.”

…

Carla leaves with a leather-bound book approximately the size and shape of a throw pillow, her hair mussed up, and her shirt half-tugged out of her skirt. Stan waves her off, with the flower she’d been wearing in her hair tucked behind his ear and a big dopey grin that he quickly covers with a scowl when he catches Mabel looking.

“Don’t you have something to be doing?” he snaps, snatching the flower out from behind his ear. Mabel doesn’t miss how carefully he cradles it in his hand, though, instead of crushing it in his fist like she’d expect. _So_ in love. “Like saving my idiot twin brother’s dumb genius behind?”

“They’re just messing with us,” Dipper declares, solemnly, when Mabel walks up behind him in the kitchen, where he’d retreated as soon as Carla had emerged into the living room. “Did you see the way she smiled at me? She knew exactly what she was doing. I’ll bet you all they did in there was talk.”

“Aww, Dipper. Denial’s not just a river in Egypt,” Mabel teases, leaning around her brother to snatch one of the mugs of noxious-looking yellow…Mabel’s gonna go with ‘tea’. “It’s totally true love.” She sniffs the mug. “Ew.”

Dipper gives her a flat stare. “You made me drink Mabel Juice. You don’t get to talk.”

“Whaaat? C’mon, bro-bro, Mabel Juice on your twenty-first birthday is practically a Pines family rite of passage!”

“If by ‘practically’ you mean ‘not at all’, then sure.”

“Oh, you’re just jealous because none of the dive bars in Carolina named a drink after _you_.” Mabel blows a raspberry at Dipper’s exasperated eye-roll. “And they never will if you keep being such a party pooper! Seriously, Dippingsauce, would it kill you to let your hair down every once in a while?”

“Mabel, you know as well as I do that actually, it could.”

“See? See what I mean?” Mabel leans over, jabbing a finger into her brother’s chest as she stares up into the teeth of his glower. “You, Dipper Pines, are a born party pooper.”

Dipper keeps glowering, but Mabel can see how he’s struggling against a grin. Mission accomplished, then. Time to face the big scary thing. Mabel gives her mug of extremely suspect yellow stuff another cautious sniff, wrinkling up her nose at the smell. “If you peed in this, you’d better put a lock on your underwear drawer, mister.”

“What? Mabel, gross.”

“I’m just saying.” Mabel bobs her head to one side, meeting Dipper’s eyes. “I have a long memory. And a looooot of itching powder.”

Dipper shakes his head, grabbing his own mug of dream root tea off the counter. “Is Stan going with us?” he asks, but before Mabel can reply, she’s cut off by Stan’s bark of a laugh as he steps around the kitchen door.

“Ha! Not on your life, kid. I’d rather not know what goes on in that noggin of Ford’s, thanks all the same. You two can go on your little psychedelic spirit quest without me.” He reaches over, gives the shotgun resting on the kitchen table a loving pat. Mabel notices, with the keen eye of a practiced detective, that Carla’s flower is back tucked behind his ear. “I’ll stay back here with the heavy artillery in case any of our _friends_ get any bright ideas.”

“Oh! If you see Pacifica, say hi!” Mabel says, because Dipper’s starting to get that constipated-kitten look again and this is going to be hard enough without him angsting it up. Luckily, whatever just fell out of her mouth seems to do the trick, because Dipper’s eyebrows crumple together and he gives Mabel a look that’s the twin of the one Stan’s shooting her way.

“Mabel, she tried to kill us,” Dipper points out. “Twice.”

“Yeah, okay, but one of those times she wasn’t _really_ trying to kill us, she was just trying to draw Grunkle Ford out -”

“So she could kill him. And us.”

“I still don’t think that counts.”

“Would both of you shut up and get on with it?” Stan grouches. “The way you’re yakking, you’d think you’ve got a full hour of airtime to fill instead of just twenty-two minutes.”

Dipper and Mabel share a look, from which Mabel can tell her brother’s just as lost as she is.

“Stan’s got a point. We’ve waited long enough,” Dipper says. “Okay. All we need is one of Grunkle Ford’s hairs in each mug, and then -”

“Wait, hold on, back it up a second,” Mabel says. “One of Grunkle Ford’s _what_?”

“Hairs,” Dipper repeats. “You have to add a piece of the person whose dreams you want to enter. That’s really basic sympathetic magic, Mabel, I’m surprised you didn’t think of it.”

“This is payback for the Mabel Juice, isn’t it,” Mabel says, squinting up at her brother. It’s not fair. _She_ used to be the taller twin. Okay, maybe only by a millimetre, but – every millimetre counts, right?

Dipper just smiles at the ceiling, and heads down the hall towards the study.

…

Thankfully, the dream root ‘tea’ doesn’t taste nearly as much like piss as it looks.

Mabel isn’t sure what she was expecting from a trip into Grunkle Ford’s head, but what she and Dipper wind up staring at is somehow both nothing at all and exactly like it. It takes her too long to realise what it reminds her of, but when she does, she hits Dipper in the shoulder over and over until he stops gawking at the endless infinity of stars that’s taken the place of the ceiling. “Dipper! Dipper, check it out! Does anything about this look familiar to you?”

Dipper gives Mabel a look.

Mabel waves a hand around the room. “Take out about half of these bookshelves, replace that one with an aquarium – put a gross old TV cabinet there – and all the detritus of Stan’s weird projects -”

Dipper’s eyes slowly widened. “Oh wow, you’re right! This is his living room, isn’t it? I didn’t recognise it without the layer of grime all over everything.”

“Grime and old man sweat!” Mabel agrees, enthusiastically. “Seriously, I’m not sure I _want_ to know where some of the stains on that armchair come from.” She prods it, cautiously, with one finger. It doesn’t do anything interesting. “Did Grunkle Ford ever live with Grunkle Stan?”

“I don’t think they lived together,” Dipper says, examining the shelves of books. “First, they’d probably kill each other within a week, and second, does anything about this setup say Grunkle Stan to you?”

Mabel gives the room another once-over.

“Nope,” she says. “You’re right, no way. But then why would the inside of Ford’s head look like this?”

“Good question!”

Both Mabel and Dipper spin, Mabel automatically reaching behind her with her good arm for her firearm before realising, first, that her injured arm isn’t hurting anymore, and second, that her pistol isn’t there. She pats all her pockets, leans over to check the ankle of her boot, but she doesn’t have any knives on her either. She’d take a moment to think about how weird this is – she doesn’t think there’s been a time since she was seven years old and their grunkle had first taught her how to shoot that she hasn’t had at least one weapon on her – but she’s a little preoccupied with the glowing yellow figure hovering in front of them.

“You’re a triangle,” she says, finally.

The triangle winks its single eye, pointing a noodly black finger in Mabel’s direction. “Got it in one!”

“You’re the demon who’s been tormenting Grunkle Ford,” Dipper says. He looks the triangle over, from the tip of its silly top hat to the toes of its spindly, featureless black legs. “Annnnnnd you’re a triangle.”

“Getting a little redundant there, kid!” the triangle says, its eye crinkling up at the bottom in what Mabel would have to call a smile. “But yep! You got me! And I know who _you_ are, too, Mabel and Dipper Pines!”

It points at Dipper, who yelps as a hole opens in his chest. Dipper sounds more surprised than hurt, but Mabel still nearly knocks him over to get at the injury. She stares at it, horrified, not really sure what to do. The hole goes clean through, revealing the gleaming edges of bone, the wet slick red of muscle, the sickly pulsing of what’s left of Dipper’s lungs and his heart. It’s way too big for Mabel to push against to try to stanch the bleeding –

Except that there isn’t any. The hole, for all its gruesomeness, isn’t bleeding. And Dipper’s not screaming in agony or passing out, just looking down with a combination of mild horror and disgust that Mabel’s also feeling. Maybe there’s a huge, gory hole in his middle, but Dipper seems fine.

Which means Mabel’s second priority has just bumped up to number one.

She doesn’t have any weapons? Fine. She’s done stupider things for less payoff. Mabel runs forward and tackles the glowing yellow triangle demon with her bare hands.

Or, at least, she tries to. But something goes sideways, and Mabel catches a glimpse of endless blue distance before she tumbles head over heels backwards across the floor and thumps against Dipper’s legs. When she looks up, the demon guy is in front of her, still glowing. Its single eye somehow looks smug.

“Ow,” Mabel grumbles, rubbing her head. She looks up at Dipper, who seems pissed off, but startled to see her. Mabel gets the uncomfortable feeling she’s lost some time.

“Come on!” the demon says, in that extremely nasal, slightly echoey, incredibly annoying voice. “I’m trying to help you two knuckleheads out, here! That’s why I brought you here to the mindscape! So we could talk!”

“Oh yeah, sure, _you_ brought us -” Mabel starts, scrambling to her feet, but Dipper drops a hand heavily on her shoulder. Mabel glances up at him, but Dipper doesn’t break eye contact with the demon.

“You did, didn’t you? You let us think this was all our idea, that we were helping Great-uncle Ford, that he _needed_ us to help him…”

“Oh, good work, kid! Give the smart guy a prize!” The demon snaps its fingers, and there’s a sharp _pop-pop_ like gunfire. Mabel springs the rest of the way up, between Dipper and the demon, flinging her arms out, but she’s painfully, sharply aware that she’s already too late –

Flecks of pale – paper? – flutter down around her, and Mabel turns, slowly, to see Dipper staring mutely at the twin confetti cannons that have materialised on either side of him. He reaches up to brush pale confetti from his shoulders, and makes a face when they leave red streaks on his flannel.

“This is not making me trust you _more_ ,” Dipper says.

“Well, you should, Pine Tree!” the demon says, brightly. Literally – the faint aura of yellow glowing in the air around it pulses brighter in time with its voice. “Because I’m your only hope!”

“Huh, you don’t _look_ like Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Mabel says, and both Dipper and the demon turn to give her a blank look. “Oh, come on! You were both thinking it.”

“I…actually don’t think I was,” Dipper says. “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘ _I’m your only hope’_?”

The demon grins, pulling a long, black, featureless cane out of thin air and giving it a twirl in front of its…face? Entire body? Face, Mabel decides. That’s what you call it on geometric shapes, right? Her experience of normal public school education might have been…spotty, but she’s pretty sure about that part.

“Let’s just say I’m not the only guy floating around this universe who thinks he’s a big bad puppetmaster!” the demon guy says, with something that might be a blink or a wink. It’s hard to tell when its face only has the one staring eye. Mabel catches herself wondering whether this is really what the demon’s true form looks like, or if this is some weird disguise it’s putting on for her and Dipper. Neither makes much sense, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. The question isn’t going to help her figure out how to kill it. “And you two make _veeeerrrry_ interesting puppets!”

“I don’t like anything about the sound of that,” Dipper says.

“Yeah, no _duh_ ,” Mabel says. “Sorry, but we’re not buying your line of bullshit.” She crosses her arms over her chest, glaring the demon guy down. “What did you do with Grunkle Ford?’

“Oh, ol’ Fordsy’s around here somewhere!” the demon says, waving a hand dismissively. “I let him wander off, and he’s probably found his way into some old memory or other! You can probably find him, if you look long and hard enough! But he’ll be fine until we’re finished here!” It folds both hands on top of its cane and balances it on thin air, leaning forward against it to peer at Dipper and Mabel. “Let me show you two something!”

Mabel reaches out and grabs Dipper’s arm when the demon snaps its fingers, and all the walls fall down. Suddenly, they’re standing on nothing, hovering in a void of howling blackness, studded by far-distant stars. Dipper leans in towards Mabel, too, reaching across to grab her other arm and pulling her into something that’s half a hug, half protective grip. Mabel really, really wishes she had a weapon.

“In the beginning,” the demon says, and Mabel jumps. She’d almost forgotten, in the terror of sudden suspension in featureless space, that it’s even there. “There was nothing. Which exploded!”

It waves its cane dramatically, causing ripples in the starlight. “Nah, I’m kidding. You two know the whole, _on the seventh day he rested_ , business, right? Can I give you the highlight reel?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait.” Mabel shakes her head, slowly stepping away from Dipper. “What is this? Where is this going?”

“Yeah, you’re right! I’m getting into the weeds here!” The demon doffs its top hat, and a blue and green marble spins out of the hat’s depths, whirls into the shape of a world. “Look familiar? It should! It’s your Earth! Or, well, _somebody’s_ Earth! A petty little backwater marble in the spiral arm of an unfashionable galaxy! And, for a couple of millennia now, a boxing ring for angels and demons!”

Behind Mabel, Dipper snorts.

“What?” Mabel asks, looking over, and Dipper shakes his head.

“Angels? You’re not serious, right?”

“As a heart attack, Pine Tree!” the demon says. “Flaming wheels, thousands of eyes, the whole shebang! And believe you me, they are _not_ nice guys!”

“Whaaaaat? You are talking about _angels_?” Mabel says. “And not, say, demons? Like you, maybe?”

“Ah ha ha ha ha ha!” the demon cackles. “Demons? Like me? Not a chance! I’ve got more in common with your angels than your demons.”

“But you told me you were a -” Mabel starts, and the demon waves its cane dismissively.

“Semantics, semantics! The demons you guys know, they’re more…well, y’know that meatsack who said ‘if God did not exist, we would have had to invent him’? Your religion doesn’t think the big kahuna buys into the whole ‘eternal cosmic punishment’ bit, right?”

“Right,” Dipper says, warily. Mabel elbows him in the side.

“But you exorcise demons all the time. Where do you think they go? Where do you think they _come_ from?”

Mabel opens her mouth, thinks of Pacifica, shuts her mouth again. The triangle guy’s eye crinkles up again in what Mabel’s starting to recognise as a smile.

“Now you’re getting it! Put two and two together, kid. Ever wonder where Hell came from? What your insipid version of demons are actually made _out_ of?”

“Not until just now,” Mabel says, at the same time as Dipper says, “Wait, like – you mean, _angels_ made it?”

“ _An_ angel, yep!” the demon says, and with a wave of its cane, the image of the planet shimmers, shivers, is wrapped in glowing white wings. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Lucifer picks a fight with Daddy, Daddy kicks him out, Lucy decides to kill everything. Long story short, everybody gets up everybody else’s noses, they decide to kick the snot out of each other, they pick Earth as their sandbox. Of course, because they’re a bunch of babies, they have to play by the rules! Signs, portents, yadda yadda. All extremely formal, all extremely _boring!_ ”

“You mean the Apocalypse? Book of Revelations?” Dipper says. He catches the look Mabel’s giving him, and adds, defensively, “Not really our area of expertise, but I’ve read _Good Omens_ five times.”

“Really, Dippin’ Dots?”

“It’s _good_ , Mabel!”

“Well, the theology’s dubious, but – close enough!” The demon gives the globe in front of it a tap, and the white wings furl back, revealing continents and oceans again for a brief moment before darkness boils over its surface instead. “Long story even shorter, they tried it with this world you see here, and got the shit kicked outta them! So they decided to move into the reality next door and try it again with a coupla saps who’d make more willing pawns!”

Mabel looks up at Dipper, and sees he’s looking at her too.

“So…” Dipper says, reaching down and running a hand through the illusion of the world. It ripples, like water, and then flows gently back into place. “The end of the world. I can’t actually say I’m all that surprised.”

“Yeah, sure,” Mabel says. “So we gotta stop the Apocalypse. Sounds good. Thanks. I think we can take it from here. Dipper? Remember why we’re here in the first place?”

The demon guy raises a nonexistent eyebrow. “Oh, hang on, Shooting Star! I haven’t even gotten to the fun part yet!” it says, throwing its little arms wide like it’s showing off some fantastic prize or something, and that’s when Mabel snaps.

“Okay, this is officially stupid. Dipper, why are we wasting time listening to this guy? He’s a _demon_! Demons _lie_!” She sweeps an arm through the globe in front of them, streaks of it turning cloudy and drifting away in all directions. “Where’s our grunkle? What did you do to him? You let him wake up _right now_ or -”

“Ahhh ha ha ha!” the demon cackles, rudely interrupting Mabel’s very good threat that she totally knew how to finish, and wipes an imaginary tear from its eye. “Oh, Shooting Star, you’re cute!”

Mabel stumbles back when the little yellow triangle, barely half as high as she is tall, suddenly looms huge over her. Its eye is now black as midnight, black as a well of ink, black as void, the pupil printed on it in stark, afterimage white. That eye presses down over her until it fills her vision, until it blots out all the stars, until Mabel can feel the faint static-electricity prickle of it against her skin.

The demon’s high, nasal voice drops low, into a bass that reverberates through her bones and nearly knocks her right off her feet, as it says, “ **Who said I planned on letting _any_ of you wake up?**”

“Hey!”

The demon hesitates just a fraction of a second too long before looking in the direction of the voice. As it turns, Dipper catches it square in the centre of the eye with its own discarded cane. Cane and demon collide with a _squelch_ that Mabel knows she’s going to be hearing in her distracted daymares from now on, and the demon stumbles back, its triangle body slowly fading from red back to yellow and shrinking away as it flails with six arms at its damaged eye.

“Mabel, find Grunkle Ford!” Dipper shouts, feinting right and making a grab for the cane. The demon catches him under the chin with one waving arm, and he grunts in pain, but when he sees Mabel hasn’t moved, waves an arm at her. “ _Go!_ I’ll keep him busy!”

“ **Oh you _will_ , will you?**” the demon thunders, but Mabel’s already on the move. She’s not sure where she’s going, and there’s nothing under her feet, that she can see, but she’s running, and the endless stars are streaming past her. Her hair sticks to her glitter lipgloss and she brushes it out of the way as best she can, her legs burning as she forces her way through the endless galaxies. When she looks back over one shoulder, she can’t see Dipper and the demon anymore.

Mabel stuffs down the sudden, icy jolt of panic that shoots through her at the sight of all that space, stretching out empty around her. She slows, to a gentle jog and then to a stop. All the stars around her look the same. If she had to go back for Dipper, she’s not even sure now that she’d know which direction to go.

She’s never going to find Grunkle Ford just by throwing herself at the problem and hoping it’ll all work out. So maybe it’s time to use her head.

Dipper’s always complained that Mabel doesn’t use logic, but that doesn’t mean that Mabel _can’t_ use logic. They’d landed in the Shack, but a Shack that was a Ford place, not a Stan place. Then the demon guy had made it disappear, to show them its little shadow puppet show with that other Earth. So Mabel had thought that only the demon could change things around inside Ford’s head.

But she had been the one who’d dispelled the globe. And she’d turned to run, thinking about putting as much distance between herself and the demon and Dipper as she could, and now she can’t even see them behind her. So…either the demon helped her get away, which doesn’t make any sense, or Mabel can influence things that happen here…too.

As a test, Mabel holds out a hand, and concentrates. She thinks about the familiar weight of her pistol, the patterns of wear on the grip that she’s run her fingers over more times than she can count, the glimmer of the silver engraving along either side of the barrel, strangely beautiful for something so brutal. She’s sure that’s part of why Ford picked it out for her. There might be better weapons – heck, Mabel’s used some of them – but none of them are _hers_.

She shuts her eyes, and thinks about the smell of the powder, the _crack_ and the kick of firing, the clean, silver feeling when she swings her arm around and aims as easily and naturally as pointing a finger and the shot flies true. She half-remembers the warmth of Grunkle Ford’s hands on her arms as he corrected her grip, her posture, her aim. Remembers those first few shots, the first time she’d hit the centre of the target, the first time she’d fired on something living and killed it. The first time she’d shot something that wanted her and her family dead, and was doing everything it could to make them that way.

She’s never let anything hurt her family, not when there’s something she can do about it. She won’t start now.

When Mabel opens her eyes, the pistol is there, in her hand, like it had never been anywhere else. And, in front of her, there’s a door.

It’s a heavy steel door, painted a dark, almost khaki green, though the paint is starting to flake away in places. There are the remnants of tape stuck to it in three places, and a hand-lettered sign saying ‘HEARING PROTECTION MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES’ in shaky capitals.

It’s familiar. It’s so familiar, in fact, that even though it’s hovering, disconnected from everything, in the vast expanse of space, Mabel already knows what she’ll find when she opens it.

Her gun hangs from her right hand, dangling limply at her side, as she reaches out and carefully turns the knob of the firing range’s door.

…

Mabel doesn’t remember, now, where the firing range was. Some little Midwestern town, some flyspeck on the map. Some place where Grunkle Ford had felt safe enough to take a couple of weeks, lie low, teach the children he’d adopted how to handle a handgun. They’d been on the road with him for almost two years at that point, never staying in one place for longer than a week, living out of motel rooms on canned food and bottled water, TV dinners and cereal. Mabel doesn’t remember all of it, of course, it was a long time ago. Just the fear, when Grunkle Ford had told them where he went sometimes and what he was doing when he left them alone. And the fear, when he’d put the pistol into her hand. The fear that he was going to expect her to shoot something, some kind of monster like the ones he was out there hunting, and leave it dead. The fear that she couldn’t. The fear that she _could_.

Still, even with everything looming over her head, those couple of weeks they’d spent in the town with the firing range had been some of the best weeks of Mabel’s young life.

It’s not exactly the way she remembers it, when she steps in – everything is lower down than it had been, seems a little smaller now that she’s fully grown. The door slams shut with an awful crash behind her, and Mabel makes her way slowly past the rows of people lined up, firing at paper targets. The air is heavy with the smell of hot metal. The sound is deafening.

She checks every back she walks past. The people don’t turn and look at her, but Mabel can tell Grunkle Ford isn’t one of them.

At the other end of the range, past all the people, is another door. This one is wooden, stained dark, and looks strangely out of place set in the cinderblock wall. Mabel has to force herself not to run to it. There’s something about all these silent, singleminded people whose eyes she can’t see, something about having to pass behind them all, that makes her want to hold her breath.

She glances back over her shoulder, and nearly freezes in fear. All along the rows, the people have turned to watch her go. Every single one of their eyes is slit-pupiled and yellow.

Mabel throws caution to the wind, bolts for the door. It’s closer now than the one she came in through, only a few scant feet between her and freedom, but the last three people step out into her way, weapons raised, eyes glinting unnatural yellow, manic grins on their faces. Mabel puts her head down and an arm up and barrels straight into a portly man about her grunkles’ age, knocking him to the concrete floor. A shot rings out, and she hears something whistle past her ear, but she ignores the sickening _thump_ of impact with flesh behind her, the startled grunt of pain. Her knuckles connect with the woman shooter’s jaw, then her knee with the woman’s stomach, and the woman goes down with blonde hair streaming. That leaves only Mabel and the younger of the two guys, standing in front of the door with his arms out like he’s ready to leap at her.

Mabel feints forwards, then jerks right, grabbing the guy’s arm as he lunges past her and twisting it sharply up behind his back. He doesn’t yell, which is creepy enough on its own, but he does let out a little gasp when Mabel kicks his knees out from behind. She pauses for a moment, thinking, and then, for good measure, hits him hard across the back of his head with the butt of her pistol. He goes down like a sack of potatoes, and stays there.

Mabel looks up, across the three bodies on the floor, and sees the crowd gathered behind her, the dull gleam of raised weapons, the eerie glow of sickly eyes.

She grins, and waves.

Then she slips through the wooden door before anyone can follow, slamming it shut behind her. The hail of bullets thumping into it sounds almost like heavy rain on the roof of a second-storey motel room, almost comforting in its familiarity.

Mabel grabs the closest heavy thing she can find – a bookshelf, standing by the door, loaded down with thick leather-bound books – and shoves it, inch by scraping inch, across the door. She isn’t a moment too soon, because seconds later, the shelf wobbles violently as something batters against the door from the other side. Mabel takes a step back, watching warily, but the heavy bookshelf stands in place.

Finally, she turns around, to see where she’s ended up.

It takes her a second. The room is not too large, cozy, a fire crackling merrily in the flagstone fireplace framed by two simple yet beautiful narrow windows with stained-glass embellishments. From the transom of each window, a red triangle stares down with a single eye, the light falling through them onto the dark hardwood floor turned dim and bloody. Bookshelves line the walls, heavily bound spines in dark leather of all different colours. Some of them are chained in place.

Mabel does a slow 360 before realising where she is. It’s been…extensively redecorated, but this has to be the Shack. This is the spare room she and Dipper had fought over the summer they’d stayed with Stan, the summer they turned thirteen. The summer Ford had dumped them on Stan, saying it was ‘too dangerous’ and ‘the less you know the better’, the summer that he hadn’t called or written or answered any of _their_ calls or even asked any of the hunters he ran into to let Stan and the kids know he was still alive –

Now that Mabel’s come face-to-face with the thing he was going after, it’s a little harder to hold onto that still-lingering ember of fury in the pit of her gut. But – he could have said _something_. Done literally anything other than what he did.

“Hello?” Mabel says, out loud, to the empty room, instead of dwelling on it. It’s in the past. Grunkle Ford is in danger right _now_ , in the present, and Mabel knows which one of those two things she can do something about. “Grunkle Ford? Are you here?”

She turns in another slow circle, looking all around. There’s a book lying open on the desk by one of the windows, the chair pushed aside as though someone had just got up, and Mabel walks over, peers down at the page. Her grunkle’s elegant cursive looks back up at her, under a pasted-in picture that looks like it was photocopied from a library book. It shows – Mabel leans a little closer, squints – a stone carving, a huge wheel covered in symbols. In the very middle, winking up at her, is that triangle with its single eye.

Mabel slams the book shut and jumps back, breathing hard. The pounding on the door has gone ominous silent. The golden image of a six-fingered hand, fixed to the cover of her grunkle’s journal, gleams in the flickering firelight.

“How much did you see?”

Mabel jumps, spinning, raising her pistol ready to fire before she sees her great-uncle, hands clasped behind his back, standing on the other side of the fireplace. Mabel looks around, but there’s no other exits or entrances from the room than the one she came through, and it’s still blocked by the bookshelf. She doesn’t lower her gun.

But Ford doesn’t make any move towards her. Or at all. The expression on his face is serious, but Mabel doesn’t think he looks angry. More…sad.

“Just that wheel,” she says, edging back towards the desk. She flips the journal back open, but all the pages have gone blank. She looks back up at Ford, but he still hasn’t moved, just standing there looking at her with that strangely mournful expression. “What is it? What _is_ this demon guy?”

“What did he tell you?” Ford asks, instead of answering. He takes a step forward, the flames reflecting off the lenses of his glasses, and Mabel takes another step back, bumping the desk. A vivid flash of the way his eyes had changed, back in the abandoned farmhouse, seconds before he’d twisted her arm almost out of its socket, bursts across her memory. For the first time since she’s been inside Ford’s mind, Mabel’s arm gives a sudden twinge of pain.

“Just a bunch of Sunday School crap,” Mabel says, trying to keep her voice and her aim steady. Ford takes another step forward, and Mabel jabs the pistol in his direction, trying to sound grown-up and serious. “Stop right there! That’s close enough.”

Ford stops, but he lets out a little huff that sounds close to a laugh. “Mabel, it’s me -”

“Oh yeah? Prove it.”

Ford looks directly at her, a fond smile crossing his face. “You’re my great-niece Mabel Pines. I adopted you and your brother after your parents’ death, when you were five years old. I gave you that gun you’re holding, there.” He gestures with one hand. “And I taught you how to shoot it.”

“Anybody could know that,” Mabel says, tightening her grip.

“Could anybody know that you still believe there are unicorns out there somewhere?” Ford says, kindly.

“There’s a whole lot of lore on them and no reason to think they _aren’t_ real!” Mabel protests, and then catches the grin spreading across Ford’s face. “All right. It’s really you. What’s going on in here?”

The smile drops off of Ford’s face so fast that Mabel thinks it must have broken the sound barrier.

“It’s bad,” he says. “Bill…”

He grimaces, like the name tastes bad in his mouth.

“Bill? That’s his name?” Mabel asks. It doesn’t sound particularly impressive for a demon, but then, she’s run into dumber.

“Bill Cipher, he told me he was called.” Ford shakes his head. “Perhaps it’s easier if I show you.”

He steps forward, putting a hand around Mabel’s shoulders, and steers her around to face the door.

Only it’s not the door she blocked off with a bookcase, anymore. It’s a white-painted door set into a pastel green wall, the blurred, dim shadows of tree branches cast across it in the pale light from a streetlight. Mabel looks back over her shoulder, sees gauzy white curtains fluttering in the breeze from the open window, sees the bunk beds stacked against the wall, sees the little white dresser and the little white dollhouse, sees the posters of kittens and dinosaurs and horses and UFOs tacked up crookedly on every flat surface.

Sees the little twin lumps, curled up one on each bunk, under colourful quilts. Hears the soft snore she’d recognise as her brother’s anywhere.

“What is this,” Mabel whispers. For some reason, she doesn’t want to raise her voice. “What are we -”

Ford interrupts her with a finger across his lips. He doesn’t say anything, but the look in his eyes is clear.

_Wait_.

They don’t have to wait long. In a moment, the fluttering curtains by the window go still. Mabel sees the dark figure, standing there, blotting out the streetlight. Its long black shadow falls across the room, across the lower bunk, across Dipper’s curls. Dipper’s little face scrumples up, and he burrows deeper into the covers.

Mabel feels, suddenly and sharply, what it must be like for a shapeshifter to know they’ve been pierced with silver. The feeling is like an ice-cold razor wire threading itself down her spine, tangling in her chest. Her brother’s just a _baby_ –

“What am I supposed to be seeing here?” she whispers, harshly, tugging on her great-uncle’s arm like, she’s all too aware, a child herself. The dark figure at the window looks up, straight at them, and Mabel’s breath catches in her throat.

Even in the dark, its eyes are clearly visible. They cast a pale, bilious yellow glow.

Mabel starts forward, but Ford’s arm across her shoulder is suddenly a vise, one hand closing on her shoulder even as the other grips her upper arm. Mabel kicks at his legs, but he holds her in place. “Mabel, it’s just a memory!” he hisses into her ear, as the dark figure starts to cross the room. Mabel catches a glimpse of a shaved head as it pulls down its hood, the bald and tattooed scalp gleaming in the dim glow from the nightlight. “You can’t change anything, this already happened!”

“Why did you bring me here?” Mabel snaps back, but the fight is already starting to drain out of her. “Just so I could watch this creepazoid hurt my brother? Burn down our house? Kill my parents? It wasn’t good enough that I remember every awful thing about that night, you had to show it to me again in living Technicolour?”

Ford flinches at that, letting go of Mabel’s arm. “No,” he says, sounding hurt. “Mabel, I would never force you to go through that again. But you _need_ to see this part. Please. I need you to understand.”

Mabel can’t remember the last time she heard her grunkle say ‘please’. Stan’s the more notorious for never using it, but Ford’s got a serious manners deficiency of his own. If he’s asking her nicely, then it must be something really important.

Reluctantly, she shuffles back, into the corner with the rocking chair, and watches as the dark figure kneels next to her brother’s bed, as it reaches out one pale, spidery hand, as it gently tugs down the covers over Dipper’s nose and brushes his curls aside to reveal –

“His birthmark? Is _that_ what this is all about?” Mabel shrugs Ford’s other hand off her shoulder. “Because I’ve seen that stupid Big Dipper a million times and -”

“Mabel.”

Mabel turns her attention back to the little tableau, and sucks in a breath.

The dark figure is hunched over the bed, five fingers pressed against Dipper’s forehead, against his stupid birthmark. Dipper’s face creases in a frown, and he twists, turns, thrashes. But he doesn’t wake up, and his wriggling doesn’t dislodge the hand on his forehead.

And then, as Mabel watches, a new and different light seeps into the room. It reminds her of blacklight, dark and yet so purple it hurts her eyes, illuminating everything in the bedroom with eerie shadows.

She’s not sure, at first, what she’s looking at. If she shifts even a little bit in either direction, it vanishes, like looking at a piece of paper edge-on. But if she stands perfectly still, she can see it, hovering in the air above her brother’s bed.

A crack.

A jagged crack in thin air, narrow as a hair, bleeding sick purple-yellow light out into the room. Mabel can feel a strange wind on her face, hears the faintest of whispers on the very edge of her hearing, not speaking any language she recognises. The crack pulses, there, in the air, for a moment, and a smile splits the dark figure’s skeletal face. He takes his hand away from Dipper’s forehead, reaching up – and in that instant, the crack closes, sealed from end to end. The whispers cut out. The eerie light vanishes.

Dipper’s eyes snap open at exactly the same time as the door slams wide, golden light from the hall flooding in to illuminate the dark figure. Mabel only catches a glimpse of her mother’s wide eyes, Dipper’s mouth opening to scream, her own figure stirring in the bunk above, the dark figure’s head going back and the first faint glow of blue flame starting in the back of his throat –

And then they’re back in the spare room, or Ford’s study, or whatever it is. Mabel sags back against the desk, swatting away the arm Ford offers her. She’s breathing hard, can feel her heart hammering in her chest, and focuses on bringing her breath back under control. Slowly, slowly, she can feel her pulse slow, can no longer feel it slamming in her throat, can feel her hands growing steadier.

“You weren’t there,” she says, at last. “How do you know -”

Ford’s voice is hard, grim. “Bill showed me. Afterwards. A taunt.” He smiles. It’s thin, a knife-edge grin. “Little did he realise he’d just undone all his own plans.”

Mabel’s fingers brush the journal on the desk behind her, and she asks, before thinking about it, “ _How_ did Bill show you?”

“The same way I just showed you,” Ford says. He hesitates, like he’s about to say something more, but then decides against it.

“Explain,” Mabel says.

“Your brother,” Ford starts, and then pauses. He runs a hand through his hair, adjusts his glasses. Mabel stares him down until he clears his throat uncomfortably. “Your brother…is an anomaly. Like me.”

“Like you,” Mabel says. Ford holds up a hand in response, waggling all six of his fingers irritably. He doesn’t look at Mabel, turning towards the fireplace instead.

“Your brother is marked. He has – Mabel, he has an _ability_. As far as my research has been able to tell, he was born with it. It’s as much a part of him as that birthmark on his forehead.” He studies the leaping flames for a moment, before spinning to face Mabel. “How much do you know about alternate dimensions?”

The sudden change of subject throws Mabel. “Uh, that there might be some?”

Ford sighs. “Unfortunately, there’s no ‘might’ about it. Bill came here from another dimension. And your brother has the ability to open doors between them.”

“That’s what that crack was?”

Ford nods, once, solemnly. “I doubt Dipper even knows he has this ability. I – I tried to keep it from you both, in hopes that Bill wouldn’t find out, wouldn’t find you. But he has. And now Bill wants your brother for the same reason he wanted him all those years ago – to open that door, to let all of Bill’s little friends free, so they can lay waste to this reality and reshape it into their own personal plaything. Luckily, he can’t possess an unwilling host, he needs to be invited, and as you saw, he can’t use Dipper’s powers without, well, without _being_ Dipper. But if he were ever to convince Dipper to let him into his mind…” He looks up, meeting Mabel’s eyes with possibly the most serious expression she’s ever seen him wear. Considering that this is _Ford_ she’s talking about, that’s saying something. “Mabel…we can’t allow that to happen.”

“Yeah, but what are we supposed to do about it? The memory gun didn’t work -”

“On _me_ , Mabel. If Bill had been possessing anyone else, it would have worked.” Ford looks away, shaking his head. “If anything had gone according to plan, it would have worked…”

“On you? But why would you be different?”

Ford still doesn’t meet Mabel’s eyes. “I placed a metal plate in my head. You can ask Stan, he helped me. For protection. To stop – to stop anything that might try to get into my mind.”

Mabel opens her mouth, but stops. Dipper’s always getting on her case for not using her head, but right now, as everything falls into place, Mabel feels a little more like her head is using _her_.

Ford had a metal plate in his head to keep out things that would get into his mind, but Bill had been able to get in just fine. He’d been able to get in and steal Ford’s body, back at the Sunrise Apartments. He’d been able to get into Ford’s head to show Ford the memory of how Dipper and Mabel’s parents had died. And Ford himself had said that Bill needed to be invited to possess someone.

Ford knew about what Dipper could do. Ford knew about Bill. Bill wanted to taunt Ford, wanted to hurt him. Bill said there was a lot they didn’t know about Ford. Stan said Ford felt like the fire was his fault…

_Bill came here from another dimension. And your brother has the ability to open doors between them._

_Your brother…is an anomaly. Like me._

“Grunkle Ford,” Mabel breathes. “You didn’t. Please tell me you didn’t.”

Ford still doesn’t meet Mabel’s eyes.

Mabel pushes herself up from the desk, slowly, carefully. She feels behind her for her discarded pistol, finds only Ford’s journal. “Please tell me you didn’t invite that demon into your head and our reality.”

Ford reaches up to adjust his glasses, still staring into the fire.

At last, he says, “I can’t open portals, anymore. The plate. Bill has no further use for me, except as a means to get at your brother.”

It’s like a slap. Mabel can’t help but flinch back. “But…why? You’re the one who taught us to trust no one! Why would you -”

“I was young. And arrogant. And sick of being treated like a freak. Bill made me feel like…like I had a friend, a purpose. Like there was more to me than what others believed. It’s only lucky I realised he was using me before it was too late.” He shakes his head, squares his shoulders before turning back to face Mabel. “Believe me, Mabel, I’ve been working my whole life to undo the mistake I made in trusting Bill. And I’m close! I’m very close! But if he gets his claws into your brother, then this was all for nothing.”

He looks off to his left, closing his eyes, as he adds, “And our world is doomed.”

Mabel takes a long breath in, and then lets it out slowly.

“Great,” she says. “Okay. _Two_ apocalypses.”

Ford blinks at her. “What?”

“Your Bill guy?”

“He’s not _my -_ ”

“He said there was a Biblical apocalypse going on,” Mabel says, ploughing relentlessly forward. There’ll be plenty of time to be mad at people and sling blame around once they’re out of here and all safe. For now, she’s going to do what she does best, and focus on the job. “That a bunch of angels came here from the next reality over to try to run an apocalypse here because they fluffed it back home.”

Ford blinks at her a couple more times.

“Interesting,” he says, stroking his chin. “Of course, I assume Bill to be lying as a matter of course, but – Biblical apocalypse _would_ explain certain unusual phenomena I’ve observed while trying to track him…of course, he could easily have manufactured them to throw me off the scent…”

“Okay, we can be nerds about this later,” Mabel says. She turns around, looks over the desk for her pistol. It isn’t there. She sighs, and conjures it back into her grip. “Right now, Dipper’s out there keeping your Bill guy busy while I’m looking for you. I’m guessing we probably shouldn’t leave them alone together.”

Ford goes so white that, if Mabel didn’t know better, she’d think he’d suddenly turned into a ghost in front of her eyes.

“No,” he says, faintly. “No, we definitely should not do that.”

“Great,” Mabel says, starting for the door, but Ford sets a hand on her shoulder and she stops in her tracks.

“Mabel,” he says, his voice very quiet. Mabel thinks she should probably turn around, but she can’t make her feet move. “I need you to – understand. How important this is.”

“Uh yeah, I think I do,” Mabel says. She wants to shake Ford’s hand off, but she can’t make herself move.

“No,” Ford says, spinning her to face him. Mabel tries to take a step back, but is pulled up short by Ford’s hand on her shoulder. The look on his face is terrible. Mabel can’t look away. “Mabel, all of reality as we know it hangs in the balance. This is what I trained you and your brother for. We _can’t_ allow Bill to get his hands on another rift.”

His eyes bore into Mabel’s as he says, “At any cost.”

Finally, finally, Mabel’s lungs inflate again. She wrenches herself backwards, out of her great-uncle’s grip. The laugh she manages sounds hollow even to her own ears. “Okay, my hearing must be getting as bad as Grunkle Stan’s, because I could almost swear you just told me to _kill_ my own _twin brother_.”

Ford’s jaw twitches, slightly, but he doesn’t move. “If necessary. Yes.”

Mabel sucks in a deep breath, plants both feet on the floor and her hands on her hips. “Well, you picked the wrong girl to stake all your hopes and dreams on, then. Because I can’t do that. And I won’t.”

“Even if it means that everyone and everything else gets wiped out of existence?” Ford says. His voice is cold, and when he tilts his head back, the lenses of his glasses catch the light, erasing his eyes.

Mabel bites her bottom lip, tilts her head to one side, lets out a slow breath.

“Well, I dunno,” she says. “But usually when people put things to me like that, there’s a third way out.” She pulls in another breath, one that doesn’t feel quite so much like molasses sinking into her lungs this time, and says, “You just gotta get creative.”

She starts to turn, but freezes in place, her own words ringing around her head, and looks down at the pistol she’s conjured to her hand.

“Mabel?” Ford asks, gently, and Mabel grins up at him.

“Grunkle Ford, I think I know how we’re going to kick that pointy jerk Bill out of your head.” She turns back to the door, still grinning. “It’s time to get _creative_ on some triangle demon ass.”

…

“I can’t believe you thought kitten fists were badass.”

“They _were_ badass,” Mabel points out, quite reasonably, she thinks. Dipper’s eyebrows shoot up towards his hairline, but he doesn’t say anything. “They worked, didn’t they?”

Dipper doesn’t say anything to that, either, but his expression gets kind of queasy, the way it did when he went through that stage where he got carsick whenever they drove for more than an hour.

“Oh, don’t you sick up on me,” Mabel threatens, waggling a finger in her brother’s face. She forgets, again, that her injured arm is hurting again, and ends up cradling it against her chest, but – worth it. “These rhinestones make this jacket a huge pain in the ass to clean.”

Dipper turns to look at her, with a curious squint. “Then why did you put them on a jacket you knew you’d be wearing in a job where you get covered in blood every other day?”

“Hey, it’s every third day at most,” Mabel says. “Because _some_ body is a big nerd who wants us to do stuff like ‘research’ and ‘recon’ and ‘not just charging in there with guns blazing, Mabel’.”

Dipper rolls his eyes, with a good-natured smile.

“I don’t really know what to make of this whole thing,” he says, at last, and Mabel glances over at him, too casual, too forced.

“What, like, the whole Bill thing?”

“Yeah,” Dipper says. “Did you hear that thing he said before he disappeared? About ‘letting us off the hook’?”

“Best not to think too deeply into it,” Ford’s voice says from behind the couch, gravelly and serious, and Mabel jumps. Sheesh. She’s getting way too high-strung for this job. “Bill likes to lie, to manipulate, to say whatever he thinks will keep people on their toes. Most of it means nothing.”

“It’s that last little bit not covered by the ‘most’ that I’m worried about,” Dipper mutters, and Ford frowns.

“Mabel told me that Bill tried to feed you some line about angels and his being your only hope. I’d advise you to forget it. Stan and I will look into whether there are actual apocalyptic omens materialising, which there might well be, but…there’s no evidence to prove that any such thing as _angels_ exist.”

“That wasn’t really what I was worrying about,” Dipper says. “Trust me, I’m right there with you on the angel thing.”

They both glance over at Mabel, which, she thinks, is actually not fair.

“Listen, unicorns are flesh and blood and there’s been a trade in their horns in Europe and Asia for centuries!” she says, hotly. “Sure, maybe a lot of it’s fake, but it’s still physical evidence! We don’t have anything on angels except a lying demon who wants to weasel out of getting put down. Angels and unicorns are _not_ on the same level here.”

“Whoa, Mabel -” Dipper starts, but Mabel pushes herself up off the couch with her good arm, a process that takes slightly longer than it should. Yup. Definitely getting too high-strung to be doing this job.

“Coffee,” she says. “Me. Getting some. Either of you guys want any?”

“No, thank you,” Ford says, with a strange look. Mabel ignores it, turning to Dipper and raising an eyebrow in question. Dipper glances back at Ford, then unfolds himself from the couch as well.

“Yeah, hang on. I’ll come with you.”

The kitchen, at least, is quiet, with Stan downstairs doing who even knows what. He’s been prepping for the apocalypse for years, so now that he has at least one and possibly even two on his hands, Mabel’s gonna put her money on ‘victory dance’.

Dipper watches as Mabel pours herself a mug of coffee, sets it carefully on the counter, pulls the milk from the fridge and gives it a sniff before upending the last of the carton into her mug, and heaps in one, two, three tablespoons of sugar without meeting his eyes.

“Mabel,” he says, at last, and Mabel nearly knocks over the mug. “What’s going on? What happened in there? You’ve been so jumpy and touchy ever since you went to find Grunkle Ford.” His voice drops, a hint of something vulnerable creeping in as he says, “I – I tried to keep Bill’s attention, but did he -”

Mabel’s head whips up almost without her input. “What? No! No, I didn’t see any sign of him.” A lie, but a little white one. Dipper doesn’t need to know about the firing range in Grunkle Ford’s head. “I’m fine, Dipper, honestly.”

Dipper looks at her a moment longer, before reaching for a mug of his own. “Okay, if you say so. But you’d tell me if you weren’t, wouldn’t you?”

Mabel hesitates, gently stirring her coffee, listening to the scrape of the metal against the ceramic.

“Mabel?”

“Grunkle Ford said something to me, when we were alone,” Mabel says, in a rush. She can already feel the band of tension knotted around her chest slacking off, making her breathing a little easier. It feels _wrong_ to keep secrets from Dipper, of all people, but she’s not sure what else she can do with this knowledge. “About you, and Bill.”

She looks up, into her brother’s confused scowl, and says, “He said Bill would try and go after you.”

“What? Why?”

Mabel hesitates, a moment, takes a sip of her coffee to cover it. She makes a face as it hits her tongue, before turning around and tilting the sugar bowl directly into her mug. Beside her, Dipper makes a gagging noise, but Mabel ignores him.

“You’re gonna have to talk to Grunkle Ford about that one,” she says, finally. She feels a little like she’s feeling her way around a dark room – too gently, and she won’t get anywhere, but too fast or too aggressive, and she might knock over and break the things she’s trying to avoid running into. “I don’t really know a lot about it, but it sounds like Bill might try to get you to trust him.”

Dipper snorts, sloshing coffee into his mug. “Well, no fear of that.”

Mabel bites down on her bottom lip. Thinks of her brilliant, self-assured grunkle’s quiet admission. _Bill made me feel like…like I had a friend, a purpose. Like there was more to me than what others believed._ Thinks of Dipper, in the car, in what’s already starting to feel like another lifetime. _I wanted college to be something that was…mine. It was nice not to be compared to you for once._

“Just…talk to me, okay?” she says, leaning over to punch her brother in the arm, so that the coffee he’s pouring sloshes up over the rim of his mug. “If you start feeling…left out, or left behind, or lonely…”

Dipper pauses, gently settling the coffeepot back onto the warmer as he looks Mabel up and down. “Mabel, what is this? An afterschool special about bullying? I’m fine.”

Mabel forces a smile, a huff that could pass as a laugh.

Dipper’s expression softens, and he nods at her. “But you know that if I did need somebody to talk to, I’d pick you over some creepy triangle any day, right?”

The smile on Mabel’s face feels a little more genuine. “Maybe.”

“Wh- maybe?”

“Yeah.” Mabel sets down her mug so she can tap one finger against her lower lip. “You might have to prove it to me, though. How about letting me read your diary?”

“ _Mabel_! I do not keep a diary!”

“Oh really? Then what’s that book you keep carrying around and scribbling in?”

“You know that’s a journal like Grunkle Ford’s! I know you have one too!”

“Oh, is that why it’s full of how much you want to kiss _We-e-e-ndy?_ Ow ow ow watch the arm!”

“Mabel, I know fifty-three ways to make sure no one will ever find the body -”

“Am I…interrupting something?”

Mabel looks up, as best she can, with the headlock Dipper’s got her in. Wendy’s standing in the door of the kitchen, looking between them with a slowly-growing smile on her face.

“Wendy!” Dipper says, letting go of Mabel so quickly and unexpectedly that she goes crashing to the kitchen lino with a yelp of pain. “Uh, coffee?”

“Sure,” Wendy says, reaching out to help Mabel up. “Y’know, it’s nice how well you two get along. Reminds me of my brothers.”

“Heh. Yeah. Get along. That’s us.” Dipper shoots Mabel a death glare behind Wendy’s back, and Mabel bats her eyelashes innocently, beaming. “I think we’re out of milk, sorry, Mabel took the last of it.”

“No big,” Wendy says, reaching up to grab a mug from the cabinet. “Oh man. Does Stan have _any_ dishware that wasn’t stolen from a bar and doesn’t have a dirty slogan on it?”

Dipper puts on a thoughtful expression, like he’s actually considering it. “Y’know, I don’t think he does.”

Mabel snags her mug of coffee from the counter and slinks towards the door. Dipper watches her go, but he’s too absorbed in his conversation with Wendy to stop her. Still, Mabel’s pretty sure this one isn’t over. She’ll have to watch her back. Dipper believes revenge is a dish best served cold. Freezing, sometimes.

Even with the warm glow that comes from thinking about her ongoing prank war with Dipper starting up again, though,  Mabel can’t quite shake the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Like there’s something she’s left undone, something important she’s missed. She glances back over her shoulder just in time to see Dipper throw back his head and laugh at something Wendy had said. It’s fine. He’s fine.

Still, Mabel can’t help but picture the gory hole Bill had punched through Dipper’s chest.

Mabel takes a big gulp of her coffee-flavoured sugar milk, trying to drown it, but the feeling of vague unease and foreboding still sits there, nagging, pulsing softly in time to the beat of her heart.

**Author's Note:**

> I started this crossover/fusion AU in a fit of excitement and then quickly realised that I was not equipped to respectfully and tastefully mash up a show that, among other things, is based entirely on Christian theology, with a show with Jewish-coded protagonists. So this is all there’s gonna be of this. I sincerely hope I haven’t butchered what I _have_ done here too badly.
> 
> Had I been able to rework the…entire storyline of SPN to make this endeavour not a questionable decision, though, the role of Literal Angel would probably have been played by Soos.


End file.
